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intuitive faculties was clothed by lesser imagery and instead with a strong body of intuitive idea and disclosing image. The language of the Upanishads has a special quality of ideal transparency through which we are enabled to look into the illimitable; we feel concretely how those Rishis fathomed things in the light of self-existence and saw them with the eye of the infinite; the words of the Upanishads remained always alive and inmortal and of inexhaustible significance.
The Upanishads can easily be perceived as books of knowledge, but knowledge in the profounder Indian sense of the word ynāna. This,knowledge is not a mere thinking and considering by the intelligence, the pursuit and grasping of a mental form of truth for the intellectual mind but a seeing of it with the soul and a total living in it with the power of the inner being, a spiritual seizing by a kind of identification with the object of knowledge. Sri Aurobindo points out that it is by an error that scholars sometimes speak of great debates or discussions in the Upanishads. As he explains, "Wherever there is the appearance of a controversy, it is not by discussion, by dialectics or the use of the logical reasoning that it proceeds, but by a comparison of intuitions and experiences in which the less luminous gives place to the more luminous, the narrower, faultier or less essential to more comprehensive, more perfect, more essential. The question asked by one thinker of another is “What dost thou know?" not “What dost thou think?" nor "To what conclusion has thy reasoning arrived?" Nowhere in the Upanishads do we find any trace of logical reasoning urged in support of the truths of Vedanta. Intuition, the sages seem to have held, must be corrected by a more perfect intuition; logical reasoning cannot be its judge."?
The Upanishads are rightly regarded as the supreme work of the Indian mind; they are epic hymns of self-knowledge, world- knowledge and God-knowledge, and they have seized the message of the Intuition and formulated it in three declarations, which have profoundly influenced the subsequent developments of knowledge and thought, "I am lie," "Thou art That, 0 Shevatketu.” “All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahaman."
2.
Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, Centenary, Edition, Vol. 1 8, p.69.
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